No Clowning Around

Zach Galifianakis stars on FX as the struggling clown Chip Baskets, but it is often the women of “Baskets” who steal the show.

Photograph by Frank Ockenfels / FX

The new series “Baskets,” starring Zach Galifianakis and produced by Louis C.K., which premières on FX this Thursday, is full of things that you don’t see much of on television these days. Its protagonist, Chip Baskets (Galifianakis), is a rodeo clown who makes four dollars an hour and lives in an extended-stay motel. His friend/chauffeur Martha (Martha Kelly, a standup comedian in her first acting role) works as an insurance adjuster at Costco and drives a tan, mid-nineties Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera. The two meet for coffee in a gas station. The show is set in California, though not a sun-kissed Apatovian Los Angeles, but instead a sun-blasted Bakersfield, where the most coveted job around appears to be behind the counter at Arby’s, and where one character remarks that the town is pretty, like a “garbage dump.” The tone of the show is as if Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickel and Dimed” had been made into a gently surreal half-hour cable comedy.

But is it funny? The critics aren’t quite sure. (Well, some aren’t. Emily Nussbaum, in her most recent column in this magazine, called “Baskets” “terrible.”) James Poniewozik, of the Times, in a review titled “ ‘Baskets’ Asks Just How Funny Comedy Needs to Be,” writes, “you’re not a philistine if you’d like to spend a little less time nodding and a little more laughing.” Poniewozik places “Baskets” among a group of shows—including “Transparent,” “BoJack Horseman,” and Louis C.K.’s own FX series—that have expanded the idea of what emotional tones a TV comedy can evoke, and how many jokes it must deliver. There is a mounting sense that shows made by some comedians may be getting a little too serious for their own good. And “Baskets” may be the bleakest of the bunch.

The first episode begins in Paris, where Chip is struggling as a student at a prestigious clown school, owing largely to the fact that he doesn’t speak French. He begs his professor to tutor him in English, telling him that “being a clown is the most important thing in the world to me.” The professor stares at him for a moment, then walks away. Later, having decided to quit school, he takes his nominal girlfriend, Penelope (the musician Sabina Sciubba), out to dinner and proposes marriage, asking her to return home with him to California. She agrees, telling him she needs a green card and will likely leave him after she meets a more attractive man. Chip is delighted. Six months later, in Bakersfield, he is staying at a motel while Penelope lives across town at a slightly nicer place with a pool. She demands forty dollars to get HBO, and Chip is forced to ask his mother (played by the comedian Louie Anderson in cleverly uncommented-upon drag) and twin brother (the proprietor, also played by Galifianakis, of a questionably accredited professional school) for the money. Along the way, after he crashes his imported French scooter, he meets Martha, who is his insurance agent. Because she is perhaps even lonelier than Chip, Martha offers to drive him places. At the rodeo, meanwhile, he shows off his highbrow clown act but gets booed by the crowd and then mauled by a bull. Only then does he earn some applause.

Like I said, bleak. But “Baskets” is funnier than it sounds. In the first five episodes, all directed by Jonathan Krisel, the co-creator of “Portlandia,” there is plenty to laugh at, from moments of broad slapstick—when Chip busts his scooter, there is a long beat before a tiny airbag deploys—to consistently funny small plot arcs, as when Chip attempts to mentor a Juggalo at the rodeo only to steer him toward a fast-food job, or when Martha rearranges her life to care for an adopted dog who turns out to be wilder than she anticipated. Galifianakis, who even in supporting roles tends to become the sweaty center of attention, takes a mostly low-key approach here, despite being the star and playing two characters. His funniest moments are quiet, subtle bits of physical humor, as when he attempts to smoke a series of bent cigarettes, or when he rollerblades home from the rodeo with a surprisingly graceful verve. As Chip, he often turns inward and sullen, lashing out from time to time, but mostly living at the mercy of the women around him.

Indeed, it is the women of “Baskets” who steal the show. Sciubba as Penelope is sarcastic and cruel, a kind of supervillainess of sexy French nonchalance. Yet, for all the degradations she gleefully puts upon Chip, there is a lurking sadness to her character, which emerges through a series of smirks, grimaces, and frowns. A swimming pool in Bakersfield, is, after all, very few people’s idea of a dream life. As Martha, Kelly speaks with the same flat, deadpan delivery she uses in her standup, and the effect is strangely captivating, whether she is muttering about the qualities of a Koosh ball or attempting to sell an executive Costco membership to a roadside orange vender. The show, so far, wisely leaves many aspects of her life unexplored—from the cause of the accident that put her right arm in a cast to the various reasons that she wants to spend her days in the morose, and occasionally mean-spirited, company of Chip. Perhaps we’ll get a Martha episode before the season ends, but the series might be better without it: the mystery enhances Kelly’s performance, drawing more attention to the minor things she does reveal. And Louie Anderson, as Chip’s widowed mother, is a revelation. Within a second or two of his first appearance onscreen, you entirely forget whatever might be gimmicky about a comedian in drag: Anderson is simply, and completely, Mrs. Baskets, lover of curly fries, bulk shopping, and other variants of the American dream. She goes from dotty and naïve to cutting and malicious in an instant—she is mean and vulnerable, befuddled and knowing, desperate and self-assured. Singing the praises of the Costco food court to Penelope, she coos, “I mean, a dollar-fifty for a quarter-pound hot dog and a drink. Très bien, right?” Mrs. Baskets, whose beady eyes contain multitudes, is already one of my favorite characters in television.

Not every part of “Baskets” works so well—like a rangy clown performance, the show makes use of perhaps one or two too many gags from its bag of tricks in its first episodes. Chip’s twin brother, Dale, is a one-dimensional, aggro-effeminate jerk, and a mere variation of what is, from Galifianakis, a familiar tone. And Dale’s goofy mock advertisements for his school, which pop up during the first few episodes, feel out of step with the rest of the series. After the second episode, the show strays from the rodeo scenes, pushing the notion of Chip as a clown from the literal to the more generally metaphorical. Yet these diversions also provide some of the richest moments for the supporting characters: an Easter dinner at a casino is hilarious and then sharply turns heartbreaking, and the show’s best scene, so far, doesn’t include Chip at all, but instead features Mrs. Baskets and Penelope touring the town and getting to know each other, while engaging in a quiet battle of wills. Mrs. Baskets warns Penelope not to hurt her fragile son, to which Penelope responds, “I can’t do any more damage.”

If “Baskets” is breaking ground, or pushing up against particular boundaries, it may not be in the muted tone of its comedy as much as in the slice of American life it portrays. While Bernie Sanders is sounding an alarm about the country’s shrinking and increasingly anonymous working class, there is a similarly shrinking working class on television, where characters, far from the glamorous cities, might be seen living lives of decidedly unquiet desperation. Chip Baskets is in his mid-forties, and despite getting a raise at the rodeo, has to move back in with his mother. Martha at one point suggests that they might borrow some cash from her niece and nephew, who are seven and eight. “My life’s in disarray now, Momma,” Chip says, while sitting next to his mother at a slot machine in a lousy casino in the California desert. “Whose isn’t?” his mother doesn’t quite ask, in reply. This is real disarray, not the TV-comedy kind of twenty or thirtysomethings struggling to find love, or neurotic city types searching for purpose. Put more starkly, there are very few working-class people on TV comedies anymore, and when they are portrayed it is mostly on animated shows, like the nineties holdover “The Simpsons” and the new Bill Burr show on Netflix, “F is for Family.” Live action is for the beautiful people; animation is where the real people live, safer and less challenging, somehow, in cartoon form. Where is this generation’s “Roseanne”?

Galifianakis, meanwhile, seems to recognize that “Baskets” may offer a narrow appeal. “Look, if it works, it works,” Galifianakis recently told Alan Sepinwall. “And if it doesn’t, it’s just a miniseries.” This may simply be an astute reading of the current television moment, in which a glut of programming has made it harder for a show to break through. But it is also a reminder that the wide-open TV present has reduced the pressure for a show to conform, or to appeal to some imagined wider audience in the first place. There might suddenly be room for everyone, even those living in the country’s quiet, overlooked corners.

Ian Crouch is a contributing writer and producer for newyorker.com. He lives in Maine.